Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(224)
The slaves’ contract…if any of them had survived…freedom…the general could see to that…
Malcolm and the girl…he wondered dimly for a moment about Inocencia; why had Cano tried to kill her…?
Because she saw him try to kill you, fathead, some dim, dispassionate watcher in his skull observed. And he had to kill you, for fear you’d find out what they’d done at Hacienda Mendez…
Freedom…even if they’d?…but Cano was dead, and Grey would never know who was guilty of what.
“Not my place…” he murmured and shut his eyes.
His hand touched the breast of his shirt and found it stiff with dried blood. He’d left his uniform coat in the kitchen…perhaps one of the women could clean it. He’d need to wear it again, to approach the British lines in Cojimar…Cojimar…a brief vision of white graveled sand, sunlight, fishing boats…the tiny white stone fort, like a doll’s house…find General Stanley.
Thought of the general drew his fragmented thoughts together, a magnet in a scatter of loose iron filings. Someone to depend on…a man to share the burden…he wanted that, above all things.
“Oh, God,” he whispered, and moths touched his face, gentle in the dark.
HE WAS GROWING COLD. He went back inside to the sala and found his mother sitting there. She had taken the manuscript from the secretaire; it sat on the small table beside her, her hand resting on it and a distant look in her eyes. He didn’t think she’d noticed him come in.
“Your…manuscript,” John said awkwardly. His mother came back abruptly from wherever she had been, her eyes alert but calm.
“Oh,” she said. “You read it?”
“No, no,” he said, embarrassed. “I…I only wondered…why are you writing your memoirs? I mean, that is what it is, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is,” she said, looking faintly amused. “It would have been quite all right if you’d read it—you may read it whenever you like, in fact, though perhaps it would be better to wait until I’ve finished. If I do.”
He felt a small sense of relaxation at this. His mother was both honest and blunt by nature, and the older she got the less she cared for anyone’s opinion save her own—but she did have a very deep degree of emotional perception. She was reasonably sure that whatever she’d written wouldn’t embarrass him seriously.
“Ah,” he said. “I wondered whether perhaps you meant it for publication. Many”—he choked off the words “old people” just in time, replacing them with—“people who’ve led interesting lives choose to, er, share their adventures in print.”
That made her laugh. It was no more than a low, soft laugh, but nonetheless it brought tears to her eyes, and he thought it was because he’d inadvertently cracked the shell she’d built over the course of the last weeks and let her own feelings bubble back to the surface. The thought made him happy, but he looked down to hide it, pulled a clean handkerchief from his sleeve, and handed it to her without comment.
“Thank you, dear,” she said, and, having dabbed her eyes, shook her head.
“Persons who have truly interesting lives never write about them, John—or not with an eye to publication, at least. The ability to keep their own counsel is one of the things that makes them interesting and is also what causes other truly interesting people to confide in them.”
“I assure you, Mother,” he said dryly, “you are undoubtedly the most interesting woman I’ve ever met.”
She snorted briefly and gave him a direct look.
“I suppose that’s why you haven’t yet married, is it?”
“I didn’t think a wife needed to be interesting,” he replied, with some honesty. “Most of the ones I know certainly aren’t.”
“How true,” she said briefly. “Is there any wine in the house, John? I’ve got rather fond of Spanish wine since I’ve been here.”
“Sangria do you? One of the maids brought me a pitcher of it, but I hadn’t drunk any yet.” He got up and fetched the pitcher—a beautiful smooth stoneware thing the color of mulberries—and brought it with a pair of glasses to the table between their chairs.
“That will be perfect,” she said, and leaned forward with a sigh, massaging her temples. “Oh, God. I go about all day, feeling that none of it is real, that everything is just as I left it, and then suddenly—” She broke off and dropped her hands, her features drawn with pain and tiredness. “Suddenly it’s real again.”
She glanced at the secretaire as she said this, and John caught a hint of something in her voice. He poured the wine carefully, not to let the sliced lemons and oranges floating in it fall out into the glasses, and didn’t speak until he’d put the pitcher down and taken his seat again.
“When you write it down…” he said. “Does that make it—whatever it is—real again? Or does the act of putting it into words make it unreal? You know, something…separate from yourself.” What had happened at El Morro had taken place mere hours before, and yet it seemed like years. But the scent of blood and guns hung about him like a shroud, and his muscles still twitched with the memory of desperate exertion.
His own words brought back to him the letters he had written now and then. The phantoms, as he thought of them: letters he’d written to Jamie Fraser—honest, conversational, heartfelt, and very real. No less real because he’d burned them all.